Blogging

evolution

17 August 2005 - Started life on Blogger.

12 October 2005 - Moved to self-hosted Blogger

13 November 2005 - Moved to hosted WordPress.com.

30 September 2006 - Purchased domain name and moved to self-hosted WordPress.org

01 July 2007 - Adsense appears.

29 August 2007 - One of many crises of confidence where I nearly shut down the blog and deleted all content.

19 January 2008 - Adsense disappears.

15 February 2008 - Moved from WordPress to Habari.

full circle

This humble blog is four years old today so tonight I will be taking ‘Blog in isolation’ and some of its closest friends to LazerQuest (Mega Death Match Party Edition with Pizza and gallons of Coca Cola to ensure the kids are well and truly revved up).

Everyone loves meaningful statistics so here is a pretty chart of posts by month (for all you management types):

Curiously, since I returned from my holiday, I seem to have rediscovered a little of my zest for blogging. Also, I have a feeling that things are gradually turning full circle. My initial decision to dip my toe in the water was prompted by reading and enjoying the writing of other people and I sense that element is slowly returning. More recently, reading blogs had turned into mindlessly hitting ‘J’ in Google Reader as fast as humanly possible simply in order to say ‘Done’.

PubSubHubbub - faster than the speed of sound

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about Feedburner’s support for the PubSubHubbub protocol.

Apparently, it means that blog posts show up much quicker in FriendFeed, Google Reader and other services. I must admit I was fairly sceptical as my posts still take a couple of hours to appear.

However, I was wrong (again). Look at this recent example. The post showed up a full three and a half hours on Google Reader before I published it.

what you see is what you get

This is a quick test to check that Habari is no longer adding additional paragraph tags and random line breaks for people consuming this blog in a feed reader.

Both of you.

Many thanks to arthus (possible pseudonym alert) aka Morgante Pell (additional pseudonym alert) for creating the plugin that made this possible and the death of autop().

Why JS-Kit and Echo is doomed

Yet another service in the overcrowded blog comment field is JS-Kit who already have a conventional outsourced blog comment capability (similar to IntenseDebate and Disqus).

JS-Kit recently announced an extension to the service called ‘Echo’ which also includes any fleeting reference to your blog post, refreshed in real-time from other services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader and Facebook.

Echo isn’t generally available to mere mortals yet. Yes, you guessed it - it’s limited beta, invitation only and curiously, you need a Twitter account to even request an invitation.

mystery man

There’s only one man in the world who could have uttered the following:

‘On Monday I unfollowed 106,000 people on Twitter.’

Yes. You guessed it - Robert Scoble.

And yes, before you ask, he used a script.

the month that never was

Since I started this blog almost four years ago, I have posted every month. Until last month - July 2009.

To accentuate the radio silence effect, this blog was also completely offline for the latter two weeks of July 2009 (PHP/FastCGI configuration problem at Bluehost).

announcing Minima - an exciting, new minimalist theme for Habari

You see - I’m really wasted in IT. I really should be in pre-sales or on ‘The Apprentice’.

I thought I’d return to my minimalist roots and change the theme on this blog.

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, no need to click through and leave a comment telling me ‘I use an RSS reader so I don’t care about your new theme’ because I already know.

If you think ‘Hey - this theme is simply a blatant rip off of Russell Beattie’s blog, I’m going to run and tell him’, don’t bother. I already know and so does Russell.

consolidation of commenting services

Since I started this blog, I have maintained an interest in various blog commenting services. Back in November 2007, I experimented with SezWho and also reviewed three more similar comment tracking services before finally settling on Disqus.

Competition is obviously a good thing but this is proving a tough climate for small, Web 2.0 companies competing in a small, overcrowded marketplace and we have recently seen some consolidation in this area.

• SezWho - Unfortunately, SezWho ceased trading yesterday with a recommended upgrade path to JS-Kit.
• Disqus - still going strong with recent announcement of improvements to performance and UI.
• coComment - still going albeit with a horrendous interface.
• co.mments - consigned to the dead pool.
• commentful - still alive. For now.

The two main commenting services that appear to represent serious competition for Disqus are IntenseDebate and JS-Kit although I have no personal experience of either product. Anyone out there used them ?

blogging statistics

Just quickly reviewed the number of posts in each full year since I started this blog.

• 2008 - 94
• 2007 - 219
• 2006 - 395

What does it all mean ? Not sure. Does it matter ? Probably not.